"A long time ago, when the world was so new nothing had a name, something woke up. It learned all about what was and what would be... but most of all it learned what couldn't be, what shouldn't be. And it gave those things names, names it wrote on indestructible pages, because a namer has mastery of the named."

Villains collect these books for their step-by-step guides to bringing about their evil plans. When read by the hapless, they tend to summonThe Legions of Hell into the mortal realm. When the books are read by the comic relief, Hilarity Ensues.

Normally these books are centuries old, but one common subversion is for them to be modern paperbacks with almost-familiar names — e.g., The Idiot's Guide to Demonology, A Child's Garden of Gibbering Horrors, The Home Handyman's Guide to Building Gates to Hell, Chicken Soup for the Soulless.

Examples:

Madlax: The Firstari, the Secondari and the Thirstari are capable of driving cities of men into their darkest emotions, creating doppelgangers, and bringing down airplanes.

Common item in the Read or Die TV series done different ways. One example had a god-like man named "The Gentleman" who had his essence written into a number of such books. In the OVA series, there's a subversion: handwritten notes in the margins of an otherwise-harmless book held the secret to driving the entire human race to suicide. The manga used it straight; The Dark Abyss, a book bound in human flesh, that the publisher required 5 different people to print, a page at a time. Reading it or listening to someone read it instantly resulted in insanity.

YuYu Hakusho has a videotape, Chapter Black, which serves essentially the same purpose. It's a recording of the worst evils ever done by humans, which human-hating Big Bad Sensui makes a point of showing to his followers to drive them insane with disgust at people.

Notably, it's part of a two-tape set. The other tape, Chapter White, records the best good deeds ever done by humans, and you're not supposed to watch one without the other. Guess what Sensui did.

Soul Eater has the Book of Eibon, written by a sorcerer centuries ago. It contains the information Arachne used to create the original Demon Weapons, and to turn herself into a psuedo-Kishin. It is currently being used by Noah, who impersonated Eibon, to collect anything he sees as interesting. Such as Death the Kid.

Which is a shout-out to the fictional tome (aka the Liber Ivonis) from the Cthulhu Mythos(see below).

The book itself is so evil that it's indexed by sins, and it currently contains at least one of the worst creatures imaginable, Excalibur. Oh, and there's a Great Old One who bears a striking resemblance to Cthulhu.

And later we learn that Noah is actually a construct of the book itself, embodying one of it's chapters, not it's owner. After the first one (Greed) is defeated, the book produces a new one - embodiment of chapter of Wrath.

The Book of Darkness in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's. It managed to open itself despite being chained shut. To power it up, you have to collect the magic power of other people and creatures; if you decline to, it will drain your power instead, slowly killing you. And when all its pages (naturally, there are six hundred and sixty-six of them) are filled, do you think you can wield its power? You're as good as dead, and so is the planet you are on. (The tragedy is that it wasn't originally that way - it has been corrupted by people who wanted to use it as a weapon.)

The Claire Bible in Slayers. Its author is benign enough (one of the good dragon-gods of the Slayers world), but its subject is the Mazoku race and the dragons' war with them, with extra details on the Mazoku-powered black magic and the secret magic of the supreme creator deity. The genuine Claire Bible is also not a book, but a sphere holding infinite knowledge, however many fragments of it are indeed scribed as books and scrolls.

In NEXT, the heroes suspect every strange magical effect they hear of to be caused by a Claire Bible manuscript, indicating that even the mundane fragmentary copies can have weird properties.

The Black Bible from the Hentai anime Bible Black, replete with demonic rituals. You really don't want to be in the building when this thing gets used. Every major spell requires a Human Sacrifice, and even the minor ones tend to cause cases of Demonic Possession.

The Books of Zeref in Fairy Tail. Black Mage Zeref wrote a bunch of books infused with magic that allows people to accomplish truly awesome and terrifying feats, such as demon summoning and time travel. Each Book contains the rituals and magic necessary to summon a different demon.

The Bigger Bad of Jewelpet Twinkle is a book in which Jewelina encased all the Dark Magic in the world. Anyone who tries to read it for their own purposes risks getting possessed by the book, in which case it's going to try to destroy everything while it has a body. Also, it can turn into a Cool Sword.

The Death Note probably counts, or at least the portion containing instructions on how to use it.

Comic Books

In an episode of The Badger dealing with Lovecraftian beasties, Mavis whipped out her "Pocket Necronomicon".

The tome called The Darkhold was written by the elder (and evil) god Chthon as one of the first—if not the first—book of magic ever. Writing the Darkhold allowed Chthon to influence the very nature of magic itself. It contains a variety of spells, but using one equals sealing your soul to Chthon, and most of them work in really twisted and sick ways. The Darkhold is also known as the Book of Sins because of its corrupting influence.

The Book of the Vishanti is said to contain every counter-spell and all defensive magic ever (to be) known, including a spell to free one from the Darkhold's control. (Oddly enough it doesn't seem to contain the spell to cure vampirism, which is in the Darkhold.) It also contains a lot of useful lore penned by previous holders of the tome and it seems to explicitly add new pages for current owners to add their own information into its pages.

Kurt Busiek's The Wizard's Tale revolves around a Tome of Eldritch Lore which the inept and not particularly evil wizard must locate and cast spells from. Fortunately, he learns that the good guys hid it rather than destroyed it because it contains a spell to banish evil. He casts it instead.

The Sinestro Corps has the Book of Parallax, which contains everything every Sinestro Corpsman has ever done or will do in the name of causing fear.

Later on we see the Book of the Black, penned in the tainted black tears of the undead Guardian Scar.

Knights of the Dinner Table lampshades this while the knights are playing Scream of Kachoolu (the webcomic strips, bound in Tales from the Vault 5): Brian warns everyone to burn all books they find. This is further compounded by the fact that the last campaign ended messily with Bob's character reading a traveler's guide to Boise.

In the Star Wars: Dark Empire comics, the resurrected Emperor Palpatine has written two and is working on a third. They were a kind of combination of Necronomicon and Mein Kampf. The Dark Empire series itself is referred to on occasion as "The Dune Sea Scrolls."

The two completed volumes of the originally intended several-hundred-volume set, to in turn be titled the Dark Side Compendium, were The Book of Anger and The Weakness of Inferiors. The third almost-completed tome was to be titled The Creation of Monsters. In the audio drama Luke comes across tapes of The Book of Anger and finds them horrifically compelling. Just listening to them makes him feel cold and perceive the world as getting darker. It takes an effort of the Force to wrench himself away, and even then he wants to study them.

The My Little Pony G1 Comics contains The Book of Horrors, an ancient tome kept locked away in Majesty's Secret Room in Dream Castle. In the comic story Ponyland in Danger it is consulted by Majesty and Gypsy after they both see ominous indications of an ancient evil approaching in the form of a red cloud.

School Mermaid: Revolves around a journal containing a spell when chanted at a certain time at night, will cause human looking mermaids to appear before the user. If the mermaid with the first letter of the boy you love is caught and killed, all you have to do is eat the flesh of it while thinking of your true love and, presto, instant boyfriend.

Fan Works

In the Jackie Chan Adventures fic Queen of All Oni, Jade is searching for the Teachings of Eternal Shadow (a series of three tablets with the Black Magic of the Shadowkhan/Oni on them) so she can increase her own power and keep Jackie and the other heroes from capturing her.

In the Harry Potter fic Inter Vivos, Draco's mother gave him a book that contained "a great deal of Dark Arts knowledge—spells, but also rituals, potions, and many other things, willed into the book by its possessors". When asked a question, it would shift into a book about whatever the subject might be - provided you asked it the right questions.

The "Black Book" in Fallout: Equestria. It contains dark, necromantic zebra magic designed to conjure flesh eating mega-spells and other nastiness

Luna becomes Nightmare Moon by reading an unnamed book about dark magic in Whispers.

Parodied in the Reading Rainbowverse by the shadowbolts book. While it can add and remove itself from the library catalog, the most terrifying thing it does is draw a dick on Lightning Dust's head.

In Altered Histories Circe was a necromancer who created her own version of the Necronomicon, made of skin flayed from the backs of a thousand men and capable of containing a thousand souls.

In The Bridge, all of the villains trained by Grogar — Equestria's Nexus of Dark Magic — were gifted with one of these. Scattered among the four of them are the components of the spell needed to free Grogar from his imprisonment.

The Book of Characters in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World might count, though ultimately it's just a throwaway MacGuffin rather than any major influence on the world. Its main significance to the four is that after George destroys it to save lives, they're fined 150,000 Swords and threatened with jail/endless pursuit if they don't pay the fine. They spend several days struggling to get the money.

A major plot point in Child of the Storm is the Death Eater/HYDRA alliance led by Lucius Malfoy steals the Darkhold and gifts it to Gravemoss. Like in it comic canon counterpart, it's the ultimate book of Black Magic, created by Chthon as a Soul Jar to maintain his foothold in reality. The book itself is indestructible, and it just being outside of its containment causes reality to slowly start breaking down.

The Life and Times of a Winning Pony: The Black Codex is an infamous grimoire written by a cabal of warlocks and lunar cultists during the Lunar Rebellion and containing information on every form of Black Magic in existence, including things like necromancy, Mind Control and demonology. Most people don't believe it's anything more than a myth, a belief the Equestrian government encourages to cut down on the number of would-be warlocks trying to get their hooves on it. In Freeport Venture: Auction Night, a copy surfaces... at an auction house in the local Wretched Hive. Sunset spends the rest of the story trying to get before a known warlock facilitator does.

Film — Animated

Sausage Party features a cookbook being treated as this. It's found in the "Dark Aisle" (i.e. the place where cook and kitchenware are located), and its illustrations of foods being cooked and eaten are presented with all the same horror as the grisly artwork inside the Necronomicon. Frank tears pages out of the book to show to the rest of the store in order to get them to believe him.

Film — Live-Action

The eponymous book in The Babadook. A pop-up book, believe it or not, one which seems to be a bedtime story for kids, the book is not just magic and cursed, but alive, sort of. The monster seems to become more and more sapient the more the book is read, and stronger the more disbelieving adults deny that it's real, tormenting children and parents alike. Tearing the book up only makes it come back with a scarier story, and while burning it prevents that, it doesn't get rid of the monster; the protagonist has to resort to other methods to finally crush it.

Grey's Almanac from the Back to the Future movies. Technically an ordinary sports almanac purchased in a conventional book store in the then-future year of 2015, this book truly matches the trope when brought 50 years into the past, as it contains information on the outcome of sports events from 1960 to 2000. Biff Tannen is able to use the knowledge to amass a fortune from gambling, eventually creating a Bad Future where he rules. Much like the typical cursed tome, burning it at the end of the second movie is required to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.

Evil Dead featured a book called Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, which, when read, resurrected a bunch of evil Kandarian spirits. In the first movie and the beginning of the second, it was called the Naturyan Demonta. By the time of Army of Darkness, it was just called the Necronomicon.

It doesn't have a name, but Winifred's book in Hocus Pocus qualifies. Given to her by Satan himself, it is bound in human flesh and cannot be destroyed by any known method (when the protagonist tries to burn it, it doesn't burn). It's also alive, proven by an eyeball set in the cover, which moves around on its own accord. Among the evil spells that Winnie casts from this book is the curse she places on Thackery which turns him into a cat and makes him unable to die, and a spell which raises her ex-lover Billy from the dead as a zombie; it also contains the recipe for the potion used to keep her and her sisters forever young - at the cost of the lives of children.

In Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders, Merlin, of all people, gives one of these to a snobby critic, of all people, to try to persuade him that magic is real. As a result, the critic summons a demon, sets fire to a cat, almost crushes himself and eventually manages to provide his wife with the baby she desires by, in a bizarre kind of "reverse incest", turns himself from her husband into her son. Naturally, Merlin thinks this is a jolly delightful jape.

The Mummy (1999) had the Book of the Dead, which unleashed the title monster upon the world, as well as its good cousin, which stripped him of his undead immortality and made him mortal.

Night of the Demon: Cult leader Karswell has one of the only copies of an ancient tome on witchcraft and demonology, written in ancient runes he claims are unreadable — though it turns out he has the translation, and uses it.

The plot of the movie The Ninth Gate (based on The Club Dumas, above) revolves around a book called De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis ("The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows"). All known copies of the text were burned along with their author Aristide Torchia because it was an adaptation of an earlier work called the Delomelanicon (the Invocation of Darkness), supposedly co-written by the Devil himself and contained clues on how to summon him in person.

In WarCraft, the ornate book Khadgar finds in Medivh's vast library is a tome on the Portal and fel magic, both of which are pretty much evil.

In Warlock, the Grand Grimoire is a Satanic book that was broken up long ago. When brought together it reveals the hidden name of God, which if said backwards will undo all that he created and destroy the world.

Literature

In Almost Night, the book by the previous Dark Lord McEvildude. The cover is bound in human flesh, the ink is made from orc blood, and each page is made from dryads.

H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon is the Trope Codifier. In addition to its cameos and parodies in all sorts of movies, books and TV shows, almost all modern instances of the trope owe something to it. The name is so ingrained in Western culture that many people think the book is real. To a degree this is helped by several companies printing versions of the ''Necronomicon'' (The "My first Necronomicon", a guide to the Cthulhu mythos for children, is done in soft felt.)

Also note that the myth that there is a "real" Necronomicon was helped by numerous pranks carried out back when there were library card catalogs, rather than electronic databases. Specifically, some smartass would create a fake card for the Necronomicon which was always checked out to one "A. Alhazred" (the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred being the fictional author of the book). In addition, during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, several instructional guides on how to tell if your kid is involved in Satanism suggested asking if they had ever read the Necronomicon.

It's mentioned briefly in Wayfarer. It is said that memorizing verses from it and intense training allows an occult student to pierce the veil which angels and demons hide from humanity.

The Necronomicon is mentioned in the Global Level section of Unknown Armies as a possible source of overwhelming magical power. This is subverted by the fact that those who get the most out of it are Bibliomancers, who gain power by acquiring rare books.

Several books called the The Necronomicon have been published, including:

A collection of short stories about the fictional Necronomicon by H.P. Lovecraft and other writers.

At least two books purporting to be the "real" Necronomicon, which contains a hodgepodge of Sumerian mythology, Hermetic lore, Kabbalah and other mystical writings. In no way do these stories relate to Lovecraft's works, however.

One written by Donald Tyson that details the 'wanderings of Alhazred', and so would be closer to Lovecraft's original idea.

At least one collection of Lovecraft's writings.

The Necronomicon is not the only book of dark lore that appears in Lovecraft's mythos. Some of the others include De Vermis Mysteriis, Liber Ivonis (The Book of Eibon), Cultes des Goules and Die Unaussprechliche Kulten (which Lovecraft thought was German for "unspeakable cults", but actually closer to "unpronounceable". Given the names of the Great Old Ones, it's probably more appropriate that way.)

Actually, there was a circle of Lovecraftian writers, and pretty much each invented his own eldritch book. The Necronomicon was of course Lovecraft's. De Vermis Mysteriis was Robert Bloch, as was Cultes des Goules. Liber Ivonis was Clark Ashton Smith. Die Unaussprechliche Kulten was Robert E. Howard. The Book of Iod was Henry Kuttner. All these writers freely referred to each other's books in their stories, along with references to other elements as well.

De Vermis Mysteriis has an important role in Stephen King's short story Jerusalem's Lot, a homage to Lovecraft. Necronomicon briefly appears in another short story, I Know What You Need.

Parodying the Necronomicon, is the Necrotelecomnicon (translated as "On communing with the deceased", or "the Phonebook of the Dead"). Supposedly, reading it would drive a man insane, which suits the purposes of the Librarian just fine (he's an orangutan, and thus not a "man").

The books (Equal Rites in particular) even recount an unfortunate case of a mage who tried to read the Necrotelecomnicon, and as a result he was never seen again, and the book became several pages thicker...

The Necrotelicomnicon also appears in the Library of Dream in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, under its alternate title, the Liber Paginarum Fulvarum (which is Dog Latin for "The Book of the Yellow Pages"). It also makes an appearance in Good Omens (which Terry and Neil wrote together).

The Octavo - the book containing the eight most powerful spells, left behind on the Disc by its creator. (When Rincewind "accidentally" read the book, one of the spells got stuck in his head; this left him unable to learn any other spells [even after he got rid of it] - and was responsible for much of the plot of the first two books.)

And then there's the footnote about how, like Oxford's Bodleian Library, Unseen University's Library has the books chained to the shelves. The difference is that in the Bodleian that's to stop the students damaging the books, while at UU it's...the other way around.

UU also has several volumes of sex magic, one of which must be kept in a room full of ice. Humans can't read them without being driven a very specific type of mad, but the librarian can, because he's an Orangutan, and simply gets unusual feelings about fruit for a while.

The Bonfire of the Witches, written on behalf of the Cunning Man, is so full of his hatred of witches that a copy of it allows a curse ineptly attempted against a witch to work simply by being in its proximity, and later almost allows said creature to manifest into the world through its pages before it's pressed shut very decisively.

Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow stories feature the eponymous play which simultaneously enlightens and drives mad anyone who reads it all. (Presumably a production would be impossible to stage.) Only a few brief excerpts, not enough to clearly indicate the plot or subject matter, are ever given. Likewise, the Yellow Sign is never actually described. Chambers' stories predated Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories and Lovecraft cited them as an inspiration.

A similar work in the Cthulhu Mythos, the Massa di Requiem par Shuggay. is an "opera" that is impossible to perform. Why? If the performance isn't interrupted, Azathoth is summoned midway through the second act. This would lead to everyone going mad or the world ending.

The Dictionary of the Khazars, as described in the lexicon novel of the same name, was printed in a poisonous ink. Remarkably, this ink causes convulsions, pain, and eventual death not from licking or eating the pages, but from reading them, and death would always strike at a particular point on the ninth page.

One might argue that the Book of the Dead in the Undead and ______ books by Mary Janice Davidson is a Tome of Eldritch Lore, as it can only be read for a page or two at a time before it starts to mess with your head. Though given that it gives instructions and prophecies for Queen Betsy's entire reign (whether or not it has more unpleasant spells and such isn't mentioned), it is also a Great Big Book of Everything as well.

The vampire novel, The Historian has one of these which has the effect of attracting Vlad Dracula and his minions to those who find a copy. This is made creeper by the fact that the novel actually looks like the Tome of Eldritch Lore described within.

The book The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverté reproduces the nine illustrations that provide the clues to invoke the devil in the tome of eldritch lore (De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis — everything occult sounds better in Latin), repeated each time the protagonist finds one of the three surviving copies of the Novem Portis, as each one has a subtly different set of illustrations. There is a Twist Ending that hinges on these differences. It is little surprising that these illustrations are supposedly reprinted from the fabled Delomelanicon, or Invocation of Darkness, which legend has it was co-written by Lucifer himself.

The Malus Codicium, from the Warhammer 40,000: Eisenhorn series of novels, is such a book, as it contains many scriptures on daemon summoning, binding etc. The protagonist (an Inquisitor perfectly used to dealing with such artifacts) finds this book particularly creepy, as unlike lesser books encountered, it gives off no sinister aura. It's just like any other book...that helps you bind daemons although it does still slowly corrupt its readers to chaos.

The Necroteuch from the first book is a lesser example, it is the entire focus of the book but what exactly it does is never stated, and it emits an aura of incredible evil so it is a bit of a no-brainer what to do with it. ( After you've tricked a Chaos Space Marine into picking it up. And taken advantage of its effects to kill the Marine.)

In the Whateley Universe, one of the main characters, Sara Waite, is a young Eldritch Abomination. She owns shelves full of these, and considers them ideal casual reading material. As long as she can remind them not to eat her friends.

The Whateley library also has a restricted section of these. And a REALLY restricted section of the worse ones. Note, however, that Sara's are the ones that the library doesn't dare touch.

And then there's horror novelist Michael Waite's best-seller Incongruity, which is really The First Book Of Kellith. The relationship between Michael Waite and Sara Waite is... complicated.

In Stephen King's The Eyes of the Dragon the wizard Flagg has such a book that he has been reading for over one thousand years and is less than a quarter of a way through, lest he go mad from reading it too quickly.

The Old Kingdom trilogy features The Book of the Dead, a green leather-bound book that's different each time it's read and shows a certain disconcerting independence of movement (ie, it knows where it needs to go and will follow along with someone headed in that direction, with or without their cooperation). It can only be opened by a necromancer, and closed by an uncorrupted Charter mage - that is, the Abhorsen and their successor. Normal people find it exudes an aura of deathly chill and utter terror. It's not actively malevolent, though, since it's kind enough to ensure the reader doesn't remember the more horrifying sections until they really really need to.

In the second book of the trilogy, Lirael takes on a job working in the Great Library of the Clayr, which is a bit more like a museum. The books (and "exhibits") range from the prosaic to works of great magic, which are kept under lock and key. This has the unfortunate side-effect that if one of said exhibits gets loose somehow, the person responsible has to find a sneaky way of getting at highly protected books if she wants to have any chance at all of stuffing it back into its can.

In the young adult horror anthology Still More Scary Stories For Sleepovers, the short story "Night of the Ki-Khwan" has an example. The protagonist's scholar mother brings home a collection of texts that describe Native American rituals. One of these rituals provides instructions on summoning the titular Ki-Khwan, who are essentially Native American werewolves. The protagonist and his friends, being young and foolish boys, decide to give some of the rituals a shot late at night in the woods for a thrill. To their horror, they succeed in summoning the man-beasts. Just when it seems like they can keep their campfire going long enough to keep the creatures at bay, a rain dance they performed earlier kicks in, putting the fire out.

In the guide book How To Be A Villain, its guide to weapons contains books of evil, which more or less fit this trope perfectly.

John Barnes's One for the Morning Glory features Highly Unpleasant Things It Is Sometimes Necessary To Know and worse, Things That Are Not Good To Know At All.

Du Svardenvyrd (The Weird of the Swords) in Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy is a perfectly straight example of this trope. Written by a mad prophet, it causes mortals who read it to Go Mad from the Revelation, and it is eventually revealed that the book is basically an instruction manual for summoning the undead Storm King back into the world. Notable in that the book doesn't have any inherent mystical power, but the secrets it reveals are too much for a sane mind to accept.

The Book Bound in Pale Leather in P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath books works a lot like this, even though it was given to the Kencyr people by their God. It's not exactly nice, and neither is the book; reading too much of it can drive you mad or kill you, and the Master Runes inside are highly dangerous to use. Oh, and that leather? Human skin, and the Book appears to be alive; dropping it gives it bruises.

The Shannara Series by Terry Brooks has The Ildatch, an Artifact of Doom dating back to the war between the good Fae and the Demons. Filled with dark magics, it corrupted the rebel Druid Brona into becoming The Warlock Lord, transformed his followers into the Skull Bearers, and later transforms a new group of people into the Mord Wraiths. Destroying it serves as the main plot in The Wishsong of Shannara. Unbeknownst to all, the book is alive, reasoning, and the Big Bad of the entire trilogy. It nearly turns Brin, the main character, into a monster, before her brother brings her to her senses, enabling its destruction.

In The Cassini Division (a Fall Revolution book by Ken MacLeod) two characters peruse a market stall selling old books. One tome, Home Workshop Nanotech by a "Dr. Frank N Stein" published some 250 years before the events of the book explained in straightforward terms how to make replicating nanotech using a simple computer, some household chemicals and a tunnelling electron microscope. Sci-fi to be sure; but a mysterious ancient book containing world-shattering knowledge of things man was not meant to meddle with? Sounds pretty eldritch to me.

In The Dresden Files book Dead Beat, "The Word of Kemmler" is a book written by the necromancer Kemmler, a major Big Bad who was responsible for a whole mess of atrocities and other badness throughout history, up to and includingWorld War I. Yes, all of it.

Dead Beat also features Der Lied der Erlking, a collection of poetry, art, and prose dedicated to the Erlking, head of The Wild Hunt. Among all that poetry is a summoning rite meant to bring the Erlking and the Hunt into the world.

Otherwise subverted, though; the White Council actually encourages the spread of books of dark rituals, since they only have a limited amount of power to go around and mass-publications tend to dilute them into uselessness.

Except in some cases, as Thomas tells us, that perfectly sensible strategy backfires when just the knowledge that the rituals exist, and therefore so does the thing they're meant to summon, is enough to keep the thing in question on this plane of existence.

The dark Book (The Book Which is Not Named) in Diane Duane's Young Wizards series.

Arguably the bright Book (Naming of Lights or The Book of Night with Moon) has the same potential... reading from either book is not something you do lightly.

The short story El Libro de Arena ("The Book of Sand), by Jorge Luis Borges, contains a version of one of these. The bibliophile protagonist trades a priceless 14th-century Bible for a mysterious book in an unknown language that has no beginning, no end, pages that are out of order, and never allows the reader to see the same page twice (it is implied that the number of pages is infinite). Over time, he loses what few friends he actually had, and spends his every waking minute fanatically obsessing over a book he cannot read, copying pages and illustrations before they vanish forever. Unlike most such stories, this one appears to end relatively well—the protagonist recognizes the evil of the book, and disposes of it in a place where neither he nor anyone else will likely ever find it by tucking it into a random, dusty shelf among the National Library's 900,000 books (he first considered burning it, but feared that the burning of an infinite book might be infinite itself and cover the world with smoke). It seems to be implied that he was better off with his good old-fashioned Bibles.

The Grimmerie from the novel of Wicked is implied to be one of these, but no Ozian can actually read the thing. Elphaba can make out bits and pieces, but that's because she turns out to be only half-Ozian. It's also revealed that the Wizard's entire despotic reign is a mere Evil Plan to get his hands on it!

Hagrid's Care of Magical Creatures class has a Tome of Eldritch Lore as required reading (specifically, The Monster Book of Monsters, which tries to bite you until you pet it along the spine to soothe it). And books dealing with The Dark Arts probably aren't particularly remarkable either, considering that the only precaution taken with them is putting them in the restricted section of the Hogwarts library instead of the main section. One of these books actually screams when it's opened.

The graffitied copy of Advanced Potion-Making can be considered a homemade Tome of Eldritch Lore. It contains various spells and other magical advice on a higher level than the average student should deal with, written into the margins by Severus Snape.

Harry Potter also contains a number of cursed tomes. Ron warns Harry about books that burn people's eyes out, books that make them speak in limericks for the rest of their lives, and books that you can never, ever stop reading. And those are paltry compared to Tom Riddle's diary, a nigh-indestructible Horcrux containing a Living Memory of a psychopathic sorcerer (specifically Voldemort, the series's central villain) who can possess you from within the pages.

Secrets of the Darkest Art deals with Horcruxes and other perverse magic. Believe it or not, even that used to be kept in the Hogwarts library (albeit in the restricted section mentioned above, but is that really a deterrent for an aspiring Dark wizard?). It was only removed after a young Voldemort started asking teachers about Horcruxes and Dumbledore got suspicious. Hermione also mentions a book called Magick Moste Evile, which apparently does a "ghostly wail" when closed. However, the book only briefly mentions Horcruxes in order to say that they are so terrible they will not be discussed.

Thoroughly deconstructed and parodied in R.A. Wilson'sThe Masks of Illuminati, where a number of people are apparently mailed copies of a book that after only slightest glance sends them to suicidal mania, after first thoroughly destroying the volume. As it turns out, the whole thing was elaborately fabricated for the narrator's benefit. The real kicker? The book was Mother Goose's Rhymes - and it had even been subtly foreshadowed earlier in the story!

In the story A Witch Shall Be Born the title witch did not mind when the magician who raised her drove her off.

I could never endure to seclude myself in a golden tower, and spend the long hours staring into a crystal globe, mumbling over incantations written on serpent's skin in the blood of virgins, poring over musty volumes in forgotten languages.

Several Conan the Barbarian stories mention "The Book of Skelos", an ancient tome of black magic that contains spells for summoning demons.

In Valentin Ivashchenko's Dancing Flame:

The unnamed tome on necromancy, written by the last grand necromancer Yaromor. The book contains pure Black Magic knowledge and a large fraction of Yaromor's power, granting both to the current user. The power also actively searches for new users every few centuries, although Heroic Resolve allows to contain the power without being corrupted. Killing the user grants the world said few centuries of peace, thus forcing a later generation to deal with the next grand necromancer.

Earl Valle's spellbook. Valle is the most powerful and most studious necromancer to ever live - his spellbook contains a few things generally thought impossible for necromancers by the setting's Mutually Exclusive Magic. Valle himself was disgusted by the book's contents, so he just destroyed it.

In Vitalij Zykov's Return series, this trope takes the form of stone tablets rarely found at relic sites of ancient civilizations. The tablets are covered with text in a language older than any humanoid race, including two elven races. It's only known that the tablets contain magic-related information. The protagonist happens to learn said language by Exposition Beam, learns one of the spells and casts it in a magical duel. The resulting damage is considered overkill in comparison to magical carpet bombing by dragon squadrons.

In Strong Spirits, the protagonist's rival in mediumship, Cockcroft, has acquired a famous necromancer's Tome of Eldritch Lore and wants to summon the author's ghost to help him figure out its cryptic contents. Subverted when the ghost is finally contacted and admits he was a charlatan who wrote a fraudulent "spellbook" to impress the rubes.

The Book of Salzared in The Beyonders, though it only contains a few pages of material explaining the Word that can destroy the Emperor and the first syllable of the Word. And since the author, and source of the leather used to bind it, was a Displacer, it's still alive.

In Pact, the protagonists Blake and Rose Thorburn discover that their departed grandmother was not only a powerful diabolist, but that she wrote several dozen such books on the subject of the forces that she trafficked with, and had left them to her heirs upon her death. The given comparison is suddenly inheriting control of a historically troublesome rogue state with access to nuclear weaponry.

In the webnovel DO NOT TAKE THE SHELLS, Jonathan Vaun's bookcase contained several of these. One of them is named "The Ancient Art of Daemonism", and another "A Window into Providence".

Live-Action TV

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: The Darkhold, one of the classic Marvel tomes, appears in Season 4. Like its comic book counterpart, the book is centuries old and completely indestructible. It is also able to alter its contents according to the skills of the reader, such as changing its text to their first language, and allowing modern-day engineers to create devices far beyond the technology from the book's original time period. It also drives readers insane. When necessity required someone to read the book to save Coulson and Fitz from being trapped between dimensions, the android AIDA volunteered since her processing power would withstand the information overload and she could be rebooted if anything went wrong. The book even changed its text to binary code for her. She saved the day, but it appears to have given her real emotions, overwhelming her and sending her off the rails. Except not, as her seemingly erratic actions were at the order of her creator Dr. Radcliffe, who was corrupted by merely glimpsing the book's contents. In the season finale, it's explained that the Darkhold is able to defy all laws of physics and reality because it's from a different dimension of The Multiverse.

The Grimoire in Blood Ties is used several times to summon demons. Henry has his own copy, "confiscated" from a bunch of Medieval cultists, and uses it to sabotage summoning rituals.

On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Giles had whole bookcases filled with these. "Xander, don't speak Latin in front of the books."

He used to keep them in the library of the high school. This was lampshaded once, with the principal doing a search of the library and questioning whether it was appropriate to have in a high school library filled with tomes instructing on the uses of dark magic - despite being asked during a period of demonic-inspired moral panic against magic, this was actually quite a reasonable question, considering.

Or maybe some of Giles' friends and associates...persuaded...Snyder to give them back. Or maybe he made him forget the whole thing, and took them back himself. This IS the guy who introduced the freaky-cool ninja dude to his wife, in the fake-evil-Angel-to-fool-Faith episode.

Giles explained in an early episode that he did it because the students never come into the library. It's the perfect place for a Watcher to put a collection of books so no-one will ever read them.

Remember that in a previous episode Giles physically threatened Snyder so he would reinstate Buffy. Besides, the books were probably kept by the anti-supernatural mob and would probably return it to him since it was his "personal collection".

And then at the end of season 6, Willow absorbs all the knowledge from these books and actually does set off to destroy the world.

In Charmed, there is the Grimoire, which is the demon equivalent of the Book of Shadows.

Doctor Who: "Extremis" features The Veritas, a short book kept in the Vatican's secret library of blasphemy, the contents of which cause everyone who reads it to kill themselves. Why? Because it reveals the "world" is a computer simulation created by hostile aliens as preparation for their planned invasion of Earth, and thus no one in it is real.

Power Rangers Lost Galaxy had the Galaxy Book. Tellingly, our heroes found it answering a Distress Call from a ship whose crew had been wiped out be an unnamed monster. It might not be inherently evil, but it has the power to open a portal to the titular Lost Galaxy, a pocket dimension full of deadly space pirates. It also contains the history and location of other creatures and weapons that are nearly as dangerous.

The Book of Forbidden Knowledge in Shoebox Zoo. Its dark magic and science corrupts those around it.

Sleepy Hollow: Season 1, Episode 4, revolves around the heroes stopping a group of Hessians from retrieving the Lesser Key of Solomon an ancient text capable of opening a portal to Hell and unleashing the 72 demons sealed there by King Solomon.

Several episodes near the end of Season 2 involve the Grand Grimoire, a collection of extremely powerful dark magic gathered by John Dee (notably, not to be used, but so he could better understand and combat it). Among other things, it can open portals into the past, or awaken latent magical powers in otherwise normal people.

The finale of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, of all series, featured one of these. The fact that its pages remained blank until splattered with the blood of a murdered man really should have been a hint that the ritual it was going to be used for was not a good idea.

The Magnus Archives has a story arc about the library of Jurgen Leitner, which consisted of particularly nasty examples of this trope. The mention of his name in a statement is enough to make the usually-sceptical archivist immediately believe every word of the subject's story.

Tabletop Games

Dungeons & Dragons has had countless numbers of these over the years and editions. If one is of a magical turn of thought, caution should be taken when putting pen to paper.

The most notable and persistent of these tomes is the Book of Vile Darkness, which is so evil that reading it can damage a good person's mind, and will exist As Long as There is Evil. (The publishers of the game actually produced a sourcebook on evil by this name later on.) The original edition of D&D actually had separate versions of this text for priests and wizards, with the Book of Vile Darkness being the priestly version and the Libram of Ineffable Damnation the wizardly version. A few inversions also exist: the Book of Exalted Deeds, a book of pure goodness, also Defictionalized (and the Libram of Gainful Conjuration, its wizardly cousin), and the Libram of Silver Magic, which can only be read if you don't side with either good or evil.

All of which are mere cheap knockoffs of the REAL badass book of AD&D, The Codex of the Infinite Planes. How bad is it? For starters, it's the size of a small room. Also, it has infinite pages, literally. Just opening it can reduce you to a small pile of ashes. If you aren't killed, you can use the book to achieve near-perfect power over reality... but if you ever stooge one of the spells within, they'll never find your corpse (assuming you leave one). Legend says that in the Dictionary of Pain, the entry for the Codex of the Infinite Planes appears between the sharp sting of discovery and the salted wounds of failure.

The Tome of the Stilled Tongue, sacred to Vecna, deserves its own mention. This is the kind of book which a) can only be safely used by those worshipping an evil lich-god of scheming and dark magic and b) comes with a free human tongue nailed to the front as an example of why you shouldn't blab the secrets of the Maimed God.

A few non-magical tomes of lore have achieved prominence in D&D, including the Black Scrolls of Ahm and the notorious Demonomicon of Iggwilv.

Another is the Codex of Betrayal, which is a collection of four books, each with several dozen chapters, totaling multiple thousands of pages, written by the last follower of the God that was murdered and over thrown by Asmodeus. It chronicles the history of the god, the war in heaven, and the creation of devils, serving a similar function for devils as the Demonomicon of Iggwilv serves for their Chaotic Evil adversaries.

The Book of Keeping is not truly a magical tome, but still a dangerous one. This book contains information on summoning powerful yugoloths, even giving the true names of a few of them. No-one knows who wrote it - given that he would likely be the yugoloths' most hated enemy, he may no longer be alive. At least four copies of the Book exist, although some say as many as seven, and their owners tend to change frequently.

In the Forgotten Realms setting, one of the most powerful (if not the most powerful) artifact are The Nether Scrolls, 2 sets of 50 scrolls made of gold or platinum sheets. They are completely harmless by themselves, but they contain near-limitless amount of magical knowledge; No matter how many times the scrolls have been perused, there is always new information to be gained. In fact, the Netherese grew to be the most dominant magical empire ever known simply by the power of this artifact.

The Cyrinishad is a book written by the god Cyric, full of craps explaining how Cyric is the most awesome god ever and why you should worship him. Once you start, you can't stop voluntarily and you will become a devout worshiper of Cyric. That and alone isn't that dangerous by itself... except for the fact that it's potent enough to brainwash deities as easily as mortals. One of the reasons Cyric was a Mad God for a long time was because he read the book himself immediately after he finished writing it.

Exalted has numerous examples, but the most infamous might be The Broken-Winged Crane. How bad is it? It isn't even written yet; all the copies that exist are reverse engineered from the perfect version that comes into existence the day the world ends.note It should be noted that time travel is explicitly impossible in the Exalted setting. This has not stopped the imperfect copies from appearing well before the book is written. And seeing as the only canon character to have read the book is implied to have been abducted and mind raped by archdemons, there's a very good chance the book causes it.

As befits its tone, Deadlands has a few of these tucked away in its pages and pages of Splatbooks. The most "Eldritch Lore-y", though, would be the Whateley Family Bible, which—in addition to having the Family Tr...Shrub (don't ask) in the front pages—contains margin notes on how to perform all manner of dark arts. The irony of profaning a Holy Bible is not lost on the misanthropic family. Player Character Whateleys, while assumed to be a moral cut above their NPC brethren (and cousins and uncles, some of which are the same people), can get a "pocket sized" version, which contains less forbidden lore and can cause panic in anyone attempting to translate it...whether they succeed or not!

Mage: The Awakening has numerous books called grimoires, where a mage inscribes all their knowledge of a spell (literally; it leaves their mind forever) so that others can learn it more easily. Needless to say, some grimoires are less than wholesome, including: the book of the life of an Atlantean prophet that turns those who study it enough into a psychic clone of said prophet; a bestiary on Abyssal beings that leads the mage who reads it enough to believe that he's uncovered an important secret and that all his friends have turned on him; and the book that contains both normal spells and spells that draw upon the Abyss but doesn't tell you which are which. Grimoire of Grimoires is an entire sourcebook dedicated to these.

The worst of these are The Final Spell Of Eli Ben-Menachem, The Invisible Codex, The Tome of Power, and The Prince of 100,000 Leaves. The first is a seemingly-sentient spell that teaches you how to summon reversed forms of Goetia symbolizing reversed Virtues into your enemies' minds, which are actually Abyssal entities who willescape. The second is an Abyssal creature in the form of a Tome of Eldritch Lore, which actually takes that form to lure power-hungry mages so it can eat their souls. The third is also a gulmoth, but the tempting devil to the Codex'sHoney Trap, teaching its readers inherently Abyss-tainted versions of incredibly destructive magic designed specifically for them to have talent with, and when the mage is fully corrupted summons a different gulmoth to continue their education. The last is the heart of an Annunaki, one of the living alternate universes that compose the Abyss, that takes the form of 100,000 pages detailing a twisted alternate history for the world, which will then proceed to become real— the catch is that it's not fully written or put together.

Interesting subversion: The Ialdabaoth Codex, besides being incredibly hard to spell, seems like it at first, being an Abyssal bestiary that gradually drives its readers to paranoia and the summoning of its contents... except that's the precise opposite of the book's intended function. It's actually a prison for the various Eldritch Abominations it describes (it scours the mind of its new prisoners and writes an entry based on its findings), and the madness is the result of them trying to get out. The writers of the book were actually pretty nice people, and a story hook presented involves reconstructing their Legacy.

Not quite as bad as the others, but still quite thoroughly horrid, is the Hildebrandt Recording, a recording of a seance that contacted an entity of the Abyss. The disc is sometimes described as feeling tacky and unclean, the spells it can teach are profoundly disturbing at best, it brings misfortune to its holders, is actively sought out by profoundly vile individuals (whom it seems to actively influence), and on top of everything else, it should not exist. Hildebrandt should not have been able to even contact the entity, his equipment should not have been able to record its sounds, and for the recording to become a grimoire is just not possible, explicitly stated as such. It violates every principle of reality just by existing.

While most of them don't literally involve books (and conversely not all book-related cards in the game suffer from this, either), the game features its share of cards that play on the 'forbidden knowledge' theme by providing access to additional cards for a modest sacrifice in life points or cards already in hand or in play.

With the release of the Innistrad set, based on gothic horror, it has an archetypal example: Grimoire of the Dead, whose playtest name was, in fact, "Necronomicon".

These are one of the types of artifacts that can be found throughout the galaxy in Warhammer 40,000. They often draw the attention of treasure hunters, Inquisitors (puritanical and radical), and military forces trying to seize control of these artifacts for good or ill, and it's conceivable, even probable that battles or even wars broke out for control of these. However, it's more often that covert operatives are used to avoid drawing too much attention when someone makes a grab for one.

One of the most notable books is the Book Of Lorgar, penned by the Primarch Lorgar when he turned to Chaos and started laying the groundwork for the Horus Heresy, the Imperium's first and largest civil war. It's essentially a Bible of Evil, though it's implied to hold quite a bit of practical information, particularly on daemonology.

Another of the most notable books is the Book of Magnus, penned by Lorgar's brother, the Primarch Magnus. Where Lorgar was a preacher, Magnus was a scholar and a wizard, so the Book of Magnus is a compendium of knowledge of Chaos, psychic mechanics, and sorcery.

Then in true 40k fashion, it goes overboard with the Black Library: an entire extradimensional stronghold full of forbidden lore, guarded by space elf ninja clowns who worship a god that managed to trick other gods into eating each other. Named the Laughing God of course.

Pyramid magazine had an article detailing Clay Bricks of Eldritch Lore which fit pretty much every aspect of this trope (unreadable, evil, drive you crazy) except that they're not actually books (being from before bound books were invented, or from cultures that never did).

The Call of CthulhuRPG has the typical Lovecraft library from the original stories, and a few additions of its own. And by a few additions we mean an entire sourcebook filled with half to two page descriptions of books both taken from other Mythos sources and invented outright. The major works generally include an Apocalyptic Log hinting at what has happened to characters who came into contact with the book, a history of the book and the explicit effects both skimming and reading it have. Guess what the sourcebook is called...

The game has the Chronicle of the Black Labyrinth which was written by an insane Black Spiral Dancer Kinfolk describing the lore of the Wyrm. Reading it slowly corrupts the reader to the power of the Wyrm.

An expansion book, Warriors of the Apocalypse, includes a Bane character named Tsannik. His human host summoned him using an ill-gotten book of sorcery.

Appropriately, the Necronomicon features as a usable (by Professors only) item in the Munchkin expansion "Munchkin Cthulhu." As do Necronomicon parodies like the Necrocomicon, the Necronookiecon and the Necrotelecom.

The game has the Nine Books Of Nagash the Necromancer. The originals were destroyed but there are some copies still lying around.

Games Workshop also released a book called Liber Chaotica (the Book of Chaos), a guide to all things Chaotic in the the Warhammer world, with occasional referances to Warhammer 40k. As a different take on this trope, the writer was not trying to support Chaos, but was ordered by the Cult of Sigmar to compile it to help fight Chaos. Naturally the study of such subjects has a less than stellar effect on his mental health.

The Black Book of Ibn Naggazar in Storm of Magic games is such a powerful repository of dark magic that its bearer will become the most talented Death and Shadow mage on the field, capable of turning two power dice into an apocalyptic display...but at the same time, it eats a lot of the people around him and will eat him too if he doesn't keep it fed. It's very popular with Necromancers, Skaven mages and goblins.

Any book about the Horrors can potentially have bad effects on the person who reads it (including the Horrors source book), but probably the straightest example of a Tome of Eldritch Lore is the Book of Scales. According to legend, a group of powerful Horrors captured a dragon and forced it to write a history of the Horrors, using the dragon's own scales as pages and its own blood as ink. The dragon then scattered the scales as far apart as possible to minimize the damage. The Book of Scales allegedly contains valuable information that can be used to battle the Horror, but is so tainted that carrying around a single scale (not even reading it, mind you, just carrying it) will eventually drive a person mad.

The Back Story mentions the six Books of Harrow, which tell of the existence and powers of the Horrors. The first man to study them was found dying after ripping out his own eyes and holding them in the fire. Thus far, only one was fully translated; perhaps coincidentally, the Scouring happened a few hundred years later.

A flavor text in the Nobilis Third Edition rulebook says that A Philosophy of Treason, a book detailing the case for serving the Excrucians, has many fake copies that will remove the eyes of any who read and fill their eye sockets with worms. Oh, and the genuine article is almost as bad.

The Scrolls combine this with being Tomes of Prophecy and Fate. Referred to as "Fragments of Creation," the Scrolls are of unknown origin and number which simultaneously record past, present, and future events irrefutably; what did happen, what could have happened, what might yet happen. Even the falsehoods in them are true. (Especially the falsehoods, as is pointed out several times in the series.) To the untrained eye, the Scrolls will yield an odd chart that looks like it has constellations on it with odd glyphs printed over or under it. A knowledgeable reader will be able to interpret the Scrolls to a degree, but incompletely, and will be irrevocably struck blind. A well-trained reader, such as a member of the Cult of the Ancestor Moth, will glean much more from the Scroll and will even recover their eyesight... for a finite number of times before their sight is permanently lost. In all of these cases, reading the Scrolls tends to lead to madness for the user. Even those who merely study the Scrolls, never actually using or even handling them, are driven to complete madness with alarming regularity.

The power of the Elder Scrolls is so great, their truths so irrefutable, that not even the machinations of a Daedric Prince can overcome them; that's how the curse on the Gray Cowl of Nocturnal is broken in the OblivionThieves' Guild questline. In Skyrim, you get to read one yourself to gain knowledge of a Thu'um shout lost to time; it turns out you don't read the scroll, you see events happen as if the scroll was a window to another (possibly alternate) time. Trying to read the scroll outside of the Time-Wound temporarily robs you of vision — and the reason you only suffer that much is because you have the soul of a being that exists partially outside of time, not unlike the Elder Scroll itself. Even the dragons like Paarthurnax and Alduin himself fear the Elder Scrolls' power. Turns out that they don't just reveal events, they can alter reality as well; with no recourse left, the ancient Nordic heroes who faced Alduin invoked the power of an Elder Scroll to "cast Alduin out of time", postponing his reckoning until the age where Skyrim (the game, not the province) takes place. The residue from that event created the Time-Wound, mentioned above.

As seen in Skyrim, the glyphs on the Elder Scrolls match closely to those seen on the Eye of Magnus, an artifact of great and mysterious power connected to Magnus, the god of magic and "architect" of Mundus. This has led to the theory that the scrolls are related to that event (and their alternative name, "Fragments of Creation", further lends credence).

In Skyrim's Dawnguard DLC you undergo the same ritual Moth Priests go through to be able to read an Elder Scroll after the Moth Priest you rescued goes blind after reading one without the necessary precautions. After reading the Scroll you are none the worse for wear, likely because as the Dragonborn, your Aedricsoul protected you from the normal side-effects.

The Mysterium Xarxes, an artifact of Mehrunes Dagon, the Daedric Prince of Destruction. The Oblivion script notes actually call for Martin, the most knowledgeable major character on the subject, to react as if given "a handful of glowing plutonium" when he receives the Xarxes. It's just that sort of book.

The Oghma Infinium, which translates to "infinite wisdom" in Old Aldmeris, is bound in humanoid skin and is an artifact of Hermaeus Mora, the Daedric Prince of Knowledge (with a particular specialty in Eldritch knowledge).

Skyrim's Dragonborn DLC introduces the Black Books, which are more or less the Oghma Infinium's little brothers. Reading them teleports you to Apocrypha, the Daedric Plane of Hermaeus Mora, via black tentacles that come out of the book in search of a new power. Like many of the other examples here, it drives most mortals insane. The Dragonborn, however, gains power in the form of spell buffs, shout buffs, and skill increases.

Fallout 3 has the Krivbeknih and some other unnamed tome, part of a Shout-Out side quest in both the Point Lookout expansion and the original game, respectively.

A couple of optional quests in Fable II have the Normanomicon, the book of the extremely dead. Said quest is a touch underwhelming, as it mostly involves getting the book back from a bunch of undead mooks two bumbling brothers (Max and Sam) have accidentally summoned.

The book returns in Fable III with a more interesting quest line, which involves getting the book for the ghosts of the two brothers from the last game, and one of them going mad with power.

The Gran Grimoire in Final Fantasy's Ivalice Alliance miniseries. In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, it's a magickal tome that transforms the sleepy town of St. Ivalice into the actual Ivalice. In Vagrant Story, it's not a book per se — every stone in the city of Leá Monde is inscribed with ancient Kildean runes, turning the city into the ultimate codex of magick.

Golden Sun has the "Tomegathericon" an item which allows the party member who equips it to take the "Dark Mage" classes, and grants powers such as attacking with hellfire, summoning demons and raising zombies. Curiously, the tome is given to the party by a benevolent animistic deity, who asks that they safeguard it until the witch doctor of the tribe that worships the deity has matured enough to be worthy of receiving it (witch doctor also being a benevolent role, when not occupied by an irresponsible teenage apprentice). Note that it was actually called Necronomicon in Japanese.

The various magical tomes from GrimGrimoire. With every new "Groundhog Day" Loop cycle Lillet goes through, they become even more powerful, until she's capable of summoning dragons, golems, and arch-demons.

Shadow Hearts has the Emigre Manuscript, a book so evil that it even has skull-shaped pages. Its main selling point is that it contains instructions on how to bring someone Back from the Dead, something attempted in all four games of the series. Unfortunately, most attempts end up as grotesque Eldritch Abominations.

The Pulse Tract and R'lyeh Text count even more so. The Pulse Tract incarnates a god form the soul of the earth, one which very nearly destroyed all of Shanghai and subjected the our hero to The Mother of All Mind Rapes. The R'lyehText however, besides being named after a certain undead city, 'summons a god form beyond the stars' which was described as being as far above humanity as humanity is above insects. Eldritch indeed.

Super Paper Mario has the Dark Prognosticus. The game's intro states that "The book held frightful secrets not meant for people's eyes." Later in the game, it's discovered that Lord Blumiere was reborn as Nietzsche Wannabe Count Bleck upon first opening the book.

Forbidden Scrollery of the Touhou series is entirely about these books; it's even in the title. Kosuzu Motoori is a human bookseller and lender who collects them and has the magical ability to read them. Most of the relevant ones have youkai sealed inside. Or give birth to youkai by making you think about them. Or are youkai themselves, in book form.

Also, the Grimoire of Alice, which is always sealed up. The one time Alice used the book, she jumped from a 3rd stage boss into a Bonus Boss. However, she hasn't used it since then.

Books of dark magic and eldritch lore appear in Warcraft games. Notable ones include the Book of Medivh, which was used to summon the demon lord Archimonde, the Compendium of Shadows, and Lexicanum Demonica, which is said to contain the name of every demon in existance.

The Book of Condemnation in Suikoden V and Alhazred, the recruitable character who is looking for it.

In Shadow of the Comet, the player gets to read a few pages of the Necronomicon, although he's been warned that it would drive him crazy. (he can't move forwards in the plot without doing so) Apparently, it's safe to read it as long as you don't take it away from the room it was stored in.

"Fragments of the Book of Abdul" and "De Vermis Mysteriis" in the original Alone In The Dark 1992. The first one hurts Carnby, the latter is instant death, unless you stand in the pentagram to read it.

"Legend has it that the mad Arab Al Aksandir Garambel wrote it after he was driven insane by his very first summoning, a terrifying entity known only as Wa'tz'ynn."

In the Call of Cthulhu RPG, all the books are present, from The Book of Eibon to The Necronomicon. Books will give you knowledge of the occult, but also cause permanent Sanity loss.

In the Lovecraftian-style Interactive Fiction game Anchorhead, there are (appropriately) several evil artifacts, including a Tome of Eldritch Lore. Tip for players: don't read it.

In Tales of Phantasia, the summoner Claus main weapons are books, including the Necronomicon, Liber Ivonis, Requiem (for Shaggai), The King in Yellow, Celaeno fragments, and pretty much any other fictional grimoire from the Cthulhu Mythos. The GBA version has alternative spellings (or poor translations) of said books. Also, these books apparently weigh a ton, since Claus can use them to smack around monsters.

In Final Fantasy Legend III the wizard Shar can use the Tablet to free the people of Pureland from the Master's power. Since the whole game is a Shout-Out to the Cthulu Mythos, it's most likely the Necronomicon. In the original Japanese it's a "Goblin corpse".

In a nod to the D&D examples listed above, Planescape: Torment has a book called the Grimoire of Pestilential Thought. Not only will it offer to teach spells in exchange for the main character doing increasingly awful deeds, it can also offer 'advice' which has a very good chance of making the main character more evil just from hearing it.

The Fire Emblem series has a few of these— in fact there's an entire school of magic that is dedicated to using the magic in these kind of tomes, the aptly named "Dark" magic (Although, because Dark Is Not Evil, but many think it is, some good dark-wielders call it "Elder magic".) Effects from delving deep into the dark arts often includes insanity and corruption— whereas the spells themselves are known for having interesting effects such as; Stealing one's life force (Nosferatu), Summoning a horde of voracious insects (Swarm), Exposing someone's soul to the torment of hell (Hell), making someone explode in a shower of blood (Balberith)... but the most true to the form of this trope would be the tome of Loptyr in Genealogy of the Holy War— a book containing the power of a Child-Eating Dark God. Upon reading it, Prince Julius went completely insane, murdered his mother (he tried to kill his adorablesister too, but she was warped away before he could)... its effect: Halving the stats of anyone who challenges the wielder, unless said opponent is wielding the tome's opposite number, Naga)

Jets'n'Guns Gold Edition features the Necrofilicon, a book with such horrible grammar, reading any part of it out loud will awaken the dead in the immediate area.

In Persona 2, the In-Laqetti. Somewhat deconstructed in which the entire thing's a sham-but the rumors sparked by its release aren't, which jibe with Sumaru City's powers to bring all of them into reality.

In the Mage Towers level of Thief: The Dark Project, some documents mention a rogue necromancer's attempt to locate the dreaded "Book of Ash". As it turns out, this book can in fact be found in the sequel. From what the player can see it contains rituals in Lovecraft-speak, and has a rather nasty fate in store for anyone who reads it.

Dungeon Crawl has three: the Grand Grimoire, the Necronomicon, and the Book of Annihilations, all of which can do nasty stuff to inexperienced casters if they try to read them.

The eponymous Book of Shadows in the second Corpse Party game. May or may not be sentient.

The Codex Umbra utilized by Maxwell in Don't Starve. It can summon shadows of various sorts. In-game, it creates a doppelganger of Maxwell to work alongside him, at the cost of sanity and some Nightmare Fuel. In the backstory, however, its consequences are far more dire...

Dark Souls III: A few of these pop up among the spellbooks you can find for your teachers to interpret. The Deep Divine Tome and the Londor Divine Tome both terrify Irina of Carim; she'll reluctantly interpret them for you if you ask, but if you do, she'll eventually be corrupted to the point that she can't even interact with you anymore, constantly talking about "little creatures that never stop biting in the darkness". Cornyx of the Great Swamp will outright refuse to touch the Grave Warden Pyromancy Tome, recognizing its inherent darkness. Karla will interpret any of the dark tomes for you with no negative consequences (she's already heavily associated with darkness), though she really doesn't like looking at Divine Tomes, dark or not.

The Book of Claws from They Bleed Pixels constantly drips blood and causes the main character to have nightmares where the game takes place. At the end of the game we see that the school library is full of them.

Dwarf Fortress has a couple of examples that develop during world generation. Slabs containing the true name of a demon, or slabs containing the secrets of life and death can be created by deities, and the art of necromancy can spread further by being copied into books.

Cultist Simulator has The Locksmith's Dream and History of the War of the Roads (Censored Edition). The latter deals with a pact formed by one History's England with the Forge of Days; the former, with the thirty Hours, and the author goes mad from the revelation before finishing. You can also create your own in the form of the Atlas of Dreams, based on sanity-searing nocturnal explorations of the Mansus where the Hours dwell.

The Datasphere of 8-Bit Theater. What else it can do is a little vague (BM looked into it once as RM mentioned "knockers" and apparently the experience was "very soft"), but when Red Mage took a long look at it without interruption, he gained the knowledge of how to destroy anything that could ever exist. Sarda powered on the four orbs apparently couldn't exist, so what appeared to be a masterful plan turned into a Batman Gambit that nearly ended the world. Only a nine-year-old brick joke saved the world from Chaos.

She refused to use it as her Weapon of Choice because it sounded like a bad idea. However, that didn't prevent her from using it in alchemy to make the Thorns of Oglogoth, which she does use as weapons even though no sane person should.

Exterminatus Now had the Necrotelenomicon in one arc, a book made from its author that was apparently like a phone book of the Immaterium. A cult was attempting to use it to resurrect their god, but they couldn't translate it and even attempting to read it made their eyes bleed. Virus and Rogue retrieved it from them by allowing them to scan some pages and run them through an online translator, reasoning that whatever it spat out would be completely useless.

Meta-example: Book Of Lies is a collection of short horror stories. The comic itself is meant to be the Tome.

Awful Hospital: Ms. Green ends up buying one of these at a store in a village of bacteria. It's chained up.

Web Original

The Necronomicon and The King in Yellow exist in the Whateley Universe, as does The First Book of the Kellith. Unfortunately for the future of said universe, that particular book was actually published as a horror novel, and it was a best seller.

Subverted in an Earthworm Jim episode "The Book of Doom", in which the "most evil book in the universe" is revealed to be Fuzzy Wuzzy's Funny Animal Pop-Up Book. Doubly subverted in that a few copies turned out to have accidentally been printed with a page explaining how to destroy the universe, just after the pudgy-wudgy hippo.

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983) and She-Ra: Princess of Power had a few of these, including a spellbook that would summon Daimar the Demon, in the He-Man episode "Daimar the Demon", and the Ancients' Book of Spells in "A Bird in the Hand". In the She-Ra series, Shadow Weaver got ahold of the Eldritch Book of Spells in "The Eldritch Mist". Then Madam Razz had to locate the Nameless Glowing Book to find a spell to get She-Ra out of the Sixth Dimension in "Three Courageous Hearts".

The show parodied it in the first Treehouse of Horror episode, where one segment features an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven". When the line about reading the quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore comes around, we find Homer reading a book titled "Forgotten Lore, Volume III".

In another episode, Lisa is cleaning out the garage and finds a thick leather bound book. She begins to read the Latin and behind her, a demon begins to form. However the horror is foiled when she tosses the book aside in favor of Mad Libs.

And again in Halloween special III where Bart and Lisa find a book in the library's "Occult section". Bart attempts to bring back their dead cat Snowball but end up raising the dead in the human cemetery, which was right next to the pet cemetery.

Also the members of Springfield's Republican Party read from the Necronomicon.

Titanium Chef from Sushi Pack uses recipes from "The Book of Chum Chop: Ancient Recipes for Chaos and Mayhem" to perpetrate his villainy. This includes creating perfect (but emotionless) doppelgangers, opening a warp to a parallel universe, and cooking up a batch of shoeshine that makes anyone who uses it feel cold even though they're not (It Was Evil In Context).

During the trial episode of season 1, Dr. Orpheus asks the bailiff to swear him in with his own book. A book that bears a suspicious resemblance to the Necronomicon. As the book snarls at the bailiff, Dr. Orpheus warns: "Careful, he's a nibbler!"

There's also the Orpheus' tome that Dean reads from in the ambiguously canon Christmas special episode. While perusing it for Christmas stories, Dean accidentally summons The Krampus. Orpheus was also known to read from it while baking gingerbread cookies.

The Grimoire of Honorius was supposedly written by Pope Honorius III; he was evidently so holy that he got bored fighting off the temptation of the mundane world and took to summoning demons solely to turn down their offers.

The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses is a usually single-volume Spell Book which purports to be Older Than Dirt. It was considered by Kurt E. Koch, a German Lutheran minister, to be an Artifact of Doom because one page in the volume maintains (he claimed) that whoever owns the volume belongs to Satannote Note: it doesn't. In other words, if it's on your bookshelf, Satan can do with you whatever he wishes. He maintained, therefore, all copies must be destroyed.

Ancient Egypt had the Book Of Going Forth By Day — popularly known as The Book Of The Dead. The book was a collection of various spells for different Pharaohs, printed on the walls of their tombs. It was essentially a collection of "prayers," or spells, but due to this, the spells were almost entirely unique to the individual. Some spells were very similar to each other, and some Pharaohs even had the exact same spells as others, but the spells were not intended to be used by anyone except the Pharaohs themselves. The spells were usually various forms of magical protection against demons in the underworld, or incantations to help one reach paradise.

The Malleus Maleficarum definitely qualifies. It's a book written by fifteenth-century witch-hunters to record the depraved practices allegedly practiced by the diabolical witches, and the equally cruel tortures that were visited on those who were suspected of being witches. However, its recommendation by the reigning Pope was forged: he denounced the Malleus Maleficarium as heretical. While the Pope had inaugurated witchcraft trials in Catholic areas, overturning the 9th century canon that said believing in witchcraft was heretical, what the authors of Malleus were doing was completely outside the laws and beliefs of the Church.

One of the books's two "authors" had his name used on it without permission (and boy was he mad when he found out) by the guy who actually wrote it, a German monk so hopelessly obsessed with demon rape that he got tossed from every monastery he got sent to after he drove the monks up the wall by talking nonstop about said demon rape.

Two particularly famous examples, the Voynich Manuscript and the CodexSeraphinianus, are often confused with each other because they're superficially very similar: Both are encyclopedias written in an unknown language, peppered with bizarre illustrations of otherworldly biology. The Codex is a "work of art" made in the 70s, but the Voynich Manuscript dates from sometime in the 14th century, is written in what appears to be a real (but unknown) language, and is filled with illustrations that just make it more confusing.

One of the most common and accepted theories is that it was made by the known alchemist and con-man John Dee. He sold it to the Czech King Rudolf II for 600 gold coins. The King was a famous patron of anything somehow resembling sciences, and had many of the best known alchemists and spiritists of the day in his pay. While this would make the book a forgery of a Tome of Eldritch Lore, it would still be an authentic 16th century forgery.

The illustration in the Voynich Manuscript are definitely not outlandish and the book resembles any other early naturalist treatise. The text, however, has not been yet deciphered.

The form of the Manuscript is a very standard one for a 16th century treatise on the medicinal uses of plants. The actual plant illustrations, however, show plants that typically have the roots of one plant, the stems and leaves of a second, and the flowers of a third. If it is a fabrication, however, the text was done in a diabolically clever manner. Modern computer analysis shows that statistically the text is entirely consistent with a phonetically written language, despite the fact that the lack of computing machines capable of performing such analyses in the time the book is first definitively known to exist would make faking such features extremely difficult.

The US Army field manual TM 31-210, "Improvised Munitions Handbook", is probably the best mundane equivalent. Won't summon demons, but almost any use will summon FBI agents. Unlike the other books in this list, Army field manuals are available on Amazon.

Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf has started to become something like this, specifically in countries where it's banned or otherwise difficult to get. (For example, in Germany, the copyright is owned by the state of Bavaria, which has never allowed any prints since the end of World War II.) Mein Kampf has a reputation for being dangerous enough to turn normal people (and in particular, impressionable teenagers) into Those Wacky Nazis, so many people argue that it must never be put back into circulation again. There are some attempts now to publish the content with annotations by historians to remove the myth from the book and showcase that it's really just incoherent rambling, which seems preferable to letting curious people just dig up the text on the internet on sites with dubious character.

The Turner Diaries. Sure, it seems like just a controversial underground novel and work of fiction written by a White Supremacist (okay, that may be a rather overt understatement) but members of American law enforcement knew this book was potentially trouble long before a great many incidents were inspired by it. Most notably, it inspired Timothy McVeigh to orchestrate the Oklahoma City bombing. One FBI agent said that when he heard of the attack, he was reminded of the book "within the hour". Also, several murders that were ruled as hate-crimes were committed by people who read this book, a full list here.

Arguably, the Football (a briefcase containing nuclear missile launch codes, always within easy reach of the President of the United States), which in the wrong hands probably is capable of bringing about The End of the World as We Know It.

And very concerning, after the assassination attempt on President Regan, it was actually lost for a time and a new copy of the codes had to be located for then-Acting President Bush.

The Mystery of the Cathedrals. Written by an alchemist in the 1920's using the pen name Fulcanelli, the work makes the case that the Cathedrals of Europe, as built by freemasons, are in fact stone manuals outlining the "Great Work" of alchemy. The work was followed by a sequel, The Dwellings of the Philosphers. A third manuscript was intended for publication, however, it was recalled by the author at the last minute due to its secrets being too dangerous for public consumption. Interestingly, the CIA had an extensive file on Fulcanelli and conducted a massive search for him in the years following WW2.

The Book of Weird (also titled The Glass Harmonica) by Barbara Ninde Byfield. It's a relatively modern book, mostly tongue-in-cheek, but has that grimoire feel.

The Catcher in the Rye. Most famously found in the possession of Mark David Chapman, the man who assassinated John Lennon who claimed inspiration for the act came from the book, as well as John Hinckley, Jr. Ronald Reagan's would be assassin. The book has been further linked to other famous murderers and assassins. Conspiracy theorists have claimed that the book is somehow used by shadowy government forces as a trigger for sleeper assassins like in The Manchurian Candidate, something touched upon in several movies such as the Mel Gibson thriller Conspiracy Theory.

There have been actual serious psychological debates as to why Catcher was so popular with a certain kind of assassin; the most common is that it's about an outsider with an unhealthy fixation on innocence and authenticity, one whose Unreliable Narrator tendencies are only visible if you're paying close attention.

L. Ron Hubbard claimed to have written a manuscript entitled Excalibur that caused people to go insane or commit suicide. Early Scientologists once sold copies of this manuscript for $1500.

A lot of Scientology is filled with this same principle. Take for example, the infamous Xenu story.note 75,000,000 years ago, Xenu was the head of a Galactic Confederation of Planets. The confederation suffered from overpopulation, so he abducted large numbers of beings, froze them, and flew them to Earth, where he arranged them around the bases of volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. He then captured the thetans (souls) of these beings and brainwashed them with images of all the religious imagery that exists today, including the entire story of Christ. Upon release, these thetans clumped together and attached themselves to our ancestors, and through various incarnations they remain attached to us today. If you try to cure yourself of its effects, it's supposed to trigger a sudden, fatal onset of pneumonia.

In addition to being one of William Shakespeare's darkest and eeriest plays, Macbeth is supposedly cursed. An unusually high numbers of accidents and deaths have occurred during productions of the play, which is why actors avoid referring to the play by name, calling it "the Scottish play" instead.

The Grimorium Verum, which is an occult manual generally though to be written during the 18th century, though the authorship purports to be from the early 16th century, and derived from King Solomon. Interestingly, it nicely averts Fantasy Gun Control.

Harvard's library has three books bound in human flesh, hoewever they're just about Roman poetry, French philosophy, and medieval Spanish law (that one's skin taken from one flayed alive). And apparently the practice wasn't that uncommon in the 17th century, though mostly for anatomy textbooks.

Esoteric movements within religions often take the stance that their holy texts have hidden messages accessible only to those who have been "illuminated" with supernatural wisdom and understanding, and that understanding these messages grants a deeper knowledge (and, in some cases, more control) regarding how the universe works. The most famous of these is the Kabbalistic tradition within Judaism, but there are many others.

A less literal version of this is pretty much universal in any religion concurrent with or predating early Christianity. While it wasn't usually a literal book due to low literacy rates even among priests, secret rituals and prayers giving the priest greater influence on various things were pretty much par for the course, especially in early Hinduism and the Roman mystery cults. Some current religions still work like this.

The Anarchist's Cookbook deals with shady techniques like making homemade explosives. Most of the "recipes" are woefully inaccurate, meaning that uninformed Mad Bombers who use the book are far more likely to accidentally maim themselves than to commit any effective terrorism. Worse, since the early days of The Internet, sites like Usenet have been circulating various other "anarchist cookbooks" that are even less accurate than the original.

Marie Curie's notebooks. They are so radioactive, even many years since her death, they require protective equipment to handled, and are kept in a lead-lined box.

Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors, written under the pseudonym "Rex Feral" and published by Paladin Press, is precisely what its title suggests, a nonfiction step-by-step guide instructing the reader as to the best tools and techniques for committing a contract murder. The book was famously used in the planning and commission of at least one massacre—a 1993 contracted triple homicide in Silver Spring, MD, with the perpetrator following the book's advice almost to the letter. In a landmark case, the victims' families sued Paladin Press and won, claiming that Hit Man had aided and abetted the killers. On the TV program American Justice, author and First Amendment scholar Rod Smolla said that he could not leave the book by his bedside because it was "giving off evil vibrations." After the case, Paladin Press agreed to stop selling Hit Man and destroy the 7,000 copies it still possessed, but it's been estimated that there may be as many as 20,000 copies still in existence.

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